Pols turn on labor unions

Spurred by state budget crunches and an angry public mood, Republican and some Democratic leaders are focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.

Unlike past battles over the high cost of labor, this time pitched battles over wages and pensions are being waged from Sacramento to Springfield to New York City and the conflict is marked by its bipartisan tone, with public employee unions emerging as an intransigent public enemy number one in cities and state capitals across the country.

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They're the whipping boys for a new generation of governors who, thanks to a tanking economy and an assist from editorial boards, feel freer than ever to make political targets out of what was once a protected liberal class of teachers, cops, and other public servants.

And even Democrats, like the nominee for governor in New York, Andrew Cuomo, have echoed the attacks on unions.

Christie is merely the most florid voice for a calculated, national effort to fundamentally reshape the debate on the labor costs that account for the bulk of government spending at every level. And at the core of the shift is a perception among many political leaders that public anger at civil servants is boiling over.

“We have a new privileged class in America,” said Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who rescinded state workers' collective bargaining power on his first day in office in 2006. “We used to think of government workers as underpaid public servants. Now they are better paid than the people who pay their salaries.”

“It's a part of a very large question the nation's got to face,” Daniels told POLITICO in an interview. “Who serves whom here? Is the public sector—as some of us have always thought—there to serve the rest of society? Or is it the other way around?”

The new focus on public workers is the product of a perfect storm of anti-labor factors.

First are the very real financial obligations imposed by their salaries, health benefits and—especially—their traditional, defined-benefit pension plans, which have been sweetened over the years in many states by legislators eager for the support of politically-powerful unions. This is particularly true in the northern and western states that allow public workers to organize. A recent study from the Pew Center on the States found that states are short $1 trillion toward the $3.35 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits states have promised their current and retired workers, the product of a combination of political decisions and the recent recession.

But the immediate cause of the new spotlight on public sector unions is the collapse in tax revenues that came with the 2008 Wall Street crash, something that union leaders bitterly note is not their fault.